I Am Having So Much Fun Without You Read Online Free PDF

school system is gratis. The cafeteria serves a cheese course, classes run till 4:30 p.m. (and that’s without extracurriculars), and most schools run on a six-day program, with half days on Wednesdays for elementary school students and Saturdays also, once your kid’s in middle school. That’s right, in four short years, my daughter will have school on Saturdays, from 9 a.m. to lunch. Now, in theory, yes, that means one can’t go running off on a weekend getaway if one can’t get a sitter, but it also means that one can start doing something outrageous on a Friday like knock back a bit o’ port.
    Sometimes I think that I wouldn’t live in France if I hadn’t married a native, but it probably isn’t true. I spent two years at the École des Beaux-Arts exchange program in Paris and two more years in the graduate painting program at RISD inProvidence, and although I had more fun in America, I never could have afforded to have a broken wrist set, and I sure as hell would never have coughed up what those people pay for their childrens’ higher education. If Anne and I already have rows over our vacation and recreation fund on her fancy lawyer salary and my less fancy artist one with a daughter in a free school that serves her duck casserole and Reblochon before naptime, I can only imagine what would happen if we had to dole out fifty grand a year so that Cam could get felt up on a pool table littered with plastic Solo Cups by some imbecile named Chuck.
    And yet. And yet. Sometimes I feel that Anne and I lost something that was essential about us—to us, even—when we left the States. We were foreigners studying in what was admittedly a strange land where the customs and mores never ceased to provide us with fodder for private jokes. Everything delighted us. We were insouciant and pompous. Anne started taking hip-hop ballet classes and wearing linen trench coats. She stocked canned snails in my pantry and empty shells in my freezer “just in case.” On weekends in Boston, she’d make me stand in crowded places and report back on whether I agreed with her about how clean people smelled. “Like mangoes,” she said. “American girls always smell like fruit.”
    And she was my best critic. As talented as—if not more talented than—I as an illustrator, she had a built-in bullshit detector that served as a barometer for my graduate thesis show: an interactive series of pop-culture Russian dolls that depicted the rise or fall of cultural figures. For instance, in one set, the largest doll showed a painting of American women working on a factory floor during World War II. Under that, an image of a two-car garage, followed by a milk carton, then a stalk of corn. The smallest doll represented Martha Stewart. In another set, I’d shellacked newspaper clips of union protesters throughoutBritain, and underneath that, an illustration of a British-made Gloster aircraft and so on and so forth with icons of the former British manufacturing industry until you came to a small doll representing Margaret Thatcher.
    When we first moved back to Paris, I was still doing pop-culture politico work like this—or rather, I was trying to in between changing nappies and running out to Franprix for overripe bananas. But sometimes, you just get really tired of keeping up the pretenses. It’s like making small talk with the stranger seated next to you during dinner at a wedding. You’re firing through the appetizers and first round of drinks, no problem, but by the time the chicken Marsala arrives—gelatinous and tepid—you think, Lord help me, I’ve got nothing left to say. Without realizing I was doing so, I slipped into time-out mode. With my art. My wife.
    To her credit, Anne never asked that I start working on more conventional projects. I put the pressure on myself. Or rather, I felt pressure coming from Anne’s family and transformed this